I want to talk about cardio workouts for women for fat loss.

Sometimes people get on a piece of cardio equipment and barely move. When I go to a gym I often see a lot of people that are just barely peddling the bike or walking on the treadmill. They’re reading a magazine, they’re watching television, they’re not even present doing their cardio workout. They’re head is somewhere completely different.

I know that cardio can be boring, especially when it’s approached in this manner. I’m telling you that this long slow boring method of cardio is the least effective way to burn fat and the most effective time waster.

My proposal is that you do high intensity interval training or HIIT. When I get on my stationary bike (which isn’t often I must say since I’d prefer to use other exercises for HIIT), I never do long slow burning cardio, I never have the television on, I never have a magazine out. I’m only on the stationary bike for 15-20 minutes max.

You don’t need to be going for an hour, two hours; you’re not going to be burning a significant amount of calories, you’re not going to be raising your metabolism in a significant amount to be getting the fat burning results that you’re looking for by going for hours and hours.

What you want to do is HIIT, or high intensity intervals. This is where you go so hard for short a burst and then you slow yourself down and give yourself a break for an interval. There are a number of interval timing methods to use with HIIT depending on your fitness level. For a beginner, you’ll have a higher active recovery or rest ratio, for the seasoned athlete, your work interval will be longer and your active recovery or rest period will be shorter. On the bike I never get completely off but I’ll power down to the lowest intensity and then I’ll go up to the highest intensity that I can manage.

My favorite HIIT work outs are actually just using body weight. You don’t need to go and buy yourself a treadmill or an expensive piece of cardio equipment. You can be do high intensity interval training on stairs, with mountain climbers, with jumping rope, with running, with swimming, with rowing or with my all time new favorite the burpee. That’s the beauty of high intensity interval training, you should never get bored because there are so many ways you can tackle it.

Your body does adjust so you should always be changing up and challenging yourself. Your best success for fat loss when doing cardio is to lose the low slow burning cardio workouts and really increase the high intensity interval training workouts.

I can help you with some great HIIT ideas and an audio program that will help you with the timing.

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Posted in Workouts by Shawna Comments Off on Cardio Workouts for Women